SFLC will love the 7th Circuit

[Philippe Verdy]

Alexander Terekhov [mailto:alexander.terekhov at gmail.com] wrote:
> > Open Source Programs Manager, Google Inc.
> 
> http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/transcript_
> richard_stallman_honary_degree_speech_pavia_2007
> 
> "Google designs software specifically to restrict the user. That's the
> nature of the Google Earth client: it is made the way it is
> specifically to restrict the people who use it. Obviously, it's not
> Free Software, because Free Software develops under the democratic
> control of its users."

Do you know which OS the Google Box integrates? You know this kind of black
box sold at expensive price, with a licence that does not allow any access
to its kernel, because it is preconfigured by Google, updated remotely by
Google, and controllable only through a web interface (it is preconfigured
to use DHCP so that it becomes accessible from your private LAN, and it is
used to index your documents in your private network and optionally act as a
gateway for the Internet from which it receives its updates).

The licence is extremely restrictive, and if you ever attempt to connect to
it with something else than its web interface, you'll need some secret
password or protocol.

But if someone has bought it, then opened the box to extract its harddisk,
I'm nearly sure you'll get a disk full on encrypted data, that is decrypted
by its ROM and a key stored in some secure device on its motherboard. But
with some electronics, you could still get some decrypted data and save a
dump. Does it use some free software in it? Or is it based on a BSD-like
kernel built by Google?

Does Google respect the copyright and licences of the embedded software if
this is the case? (Google can't pretend that the software is unaccessible if
it can be updated remotely by Google).

Now if this embedded kernel was compiled with GCC and linked with GNU C
libraries, what is happening to the licencing terms for the whole "Google
Box" kernel, wouldn't it have to be licenced under the GPL too with its
sources?